Welcome to Seer Green Parish Council Website
Seer Green is a small village of about 938 households in the County of Buckinghamshire, England.
It is said that King Arthur’s ‘seer’, Merlin, rested here on his journeys to Camelot. A more likely origin for the name is the Old English sere for dry, and grene for a grassy spot.
The village lies on silts and gravels deposited by the ancestral River Thames at the end of the last Ice Age. The surrounding agricultural lands are pasture with areas of ancient woodland, including Hodgemoor Woods, in the north of the parish.
Evidence of early occupation comes from Palaeolithic handaxes and Neolithic or early Bronze Age flint scrapers being found in the area. A major Roman Road, the route between Verulamium (St Albans) and Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester), passes through Hodgemoor Woods. In the vicinity of this road are the remnants of Romano-British field systems and a possible farmstead. Extensive medieval ridge and furrow ploughing cuts across the Roman Road. A 1561 Elizabethan Court of Survey indicates the date of these woods to be the mid-1550s, which is probably also the date of the start of field enclosure within the parish.
At Domesday, Seer Green was a part of Farnham Royal, held by Bertram de Verdun. The first certain documentary record of Seer Green (La Sere) is in a Court Roll of Henry III from 1232. For a short period in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, it was also a manor in its own right.
As part of Farnham Royal, Seer Green continued to be held by the descendants of the Verdun’s. Then it passed through the Furnival, Neville and Talbot families, becoming a holding of the Earls of Shrewsbury, and in 1541 of Elizabeth I, before her coronation.
The oldest building in Seer Green is the sixteenth century Hall Place. Other timber framed buildings include seventeenth century Colliers, Peaceful Cottage and Pondstile. The timber framed and brick-built farm buildings at Newbarn Farm are eighteenth century.
Francis Godolphin acquired the lands from the Earl of Leicester in 1753. His 1753 estate map shows the area to be fully enclosed. The 1831 Enclosure map and the 1841 Tithe map, show no further changes in partition of the land. Subsequently, the area became a property of the Dukes of Leeds.
The village is known as ‘The Cherry Pie Village’, recognising that its farms supplied cherries to London markets. The school still holds an annual Cherry Pie Fayre.
Seer Green’s heritage includes rural crafts: pottery; bodging and timber trades; lace-making, bead-work and needlecrafts. Census records show a lacemaking community in mid Victorian times and a Lace School is thought to have existed on the site on which the first Baptist Church was built in the mid-nineteenth century. A replacement Baptist Chapel was built in 1899.
Holy Trinity Church was built in 1846, with the parish becoming a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1847 and a civil parish in 1901.
In 1847 land was gifted from Mr James du Pre, of Wilton Park to build a school in the village. The School House, and one classroom was built at a cost of £500 and it opened in November 1859.
The village changed significantly with the arrival of the Great Western and Great Central Joint Railway in 1905. A railway halt was built, to service the Beaconsfield golf course at Wilton Park, and opened to the public as a full Station at the end of 1914. The railway brought an influx of people, as well as ‘Arts and Craft’ style development.
Hodgemoor Woods was occupied during WWII for troop build-up. Then, post-war until 1962, the facilities were used as a Polish refugee resettlement camp.
Further residential expansion took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The Victorian Manor Farm was replaced by a modern housing estate. A new community hall was erected to commemorate Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, and a new Baptist Church was erected in 1980.
Seer Green, off the beaten track and jealously guarding its village atmosphere, continues to seek to preserve its identify and its heritage. For further history of the village see the website:- https://www.ourlivingvillage.org/.